I do find the  criticism of photography as representation, which  states that with representation the  photograph erases itself, as an object in itself, in favour of the thing depicted,  a  rather strange one. The criticism  is that the  photo becomes a metaphysical window on something else, in relation to which it is inferior - the image is of a lesser reality than the thing of which it is an  mage or to which it refers; that which it apparently represents.

The criticism is right to the extent that a  photograph is  both a representation of  bark fragments and an object  in itself:

However,  after the demise of modernism,  why would  we say that the image is a lesser reality and  the bark primary? Surely the image is real and just as real  as the bark.   What we see on the screen  is an image--it's blurry or  indistinct,  a rich colour palette of green and orange and it is poetic.   Even though we know that this photo is a representation -- an abstracture -- of  pieces of bark that have peeled of the trunk of a tree  we do not see the image as inferior to the bark.   

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Below are 2  archival images made whilst  I was walking in the Beech Forest on the Kepler Track near  Shallow Bay,  Lake Manapouri in Southland, New Zealand,  circa February 2020. The Kepler Track is around 60km in length  and is situated  between Lake Manapouri and Lake Te Anau.

We stayed several days at Lake Manapouri near the Waiau River. There are some associated photos from walking the Kepler Track in the  Fiordland National Park on an earlier post.  Whilst walking this section of the Kepler Track I was  aware of how the  natural world  is ever changing, does things,  and  it has a history. This perspective gave rise to  the idea of a philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie) that engages with how we view, and think of,  the natural world. 

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I was on my way to Canberra. It was early in the morning and I was  driving through the Murraylands  heading towards  Wellington  to catch the ferry  across the River Murray. The days journey was  to go to Talem Bend, travel  the Mallee Highway, and have an overnight stop at Hay in NSW. I was  hoping to take some photos of the exposed roots of the redgums along the Murrumbidgee for the Edgelands project. 

I was travelling alongside  Lake Alexandrina and it was the light and the colours that caught my eye.  So I  made a cliched 'on the road' photo with my decades old one lens/one camera. It is photography with a rangefinder camera. A spontaneous snapshot with its  trace of the real.  

Whilst making the photo I realised that the Leica rangefinder film camera is basically a relic  in a world of automation and algorithms; in a world where photography is now produced through a mathematical set of rules that work autonomously, without human interference and which are self-correcting. You press the button and the program takes over to produce a data set cheaply and easily.  Perfection.

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